1. Field
The present invention relates to a microprocessor and processing method thereof, and more particularly to a technique for tracing the operation of the microprocessor.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a process for debugging a program including many instructions or in a performance measuring process of a system, to detect problems arising during a use, the operation of a microprocessor for executing the program is traced. An in-circuit emulator is known that a tracing device for tracing the operation of the microprocessor is incorporated in the microprocessor. The information of the operation of the microprocessor traced by the tracing device (hereinafter referred to as “trace information”) is transferred to an analyzing device in an external part of the microprocessor.
Since the microprocessor is operated at high speed, an executing state of the program is hardly analyzed. Therefore, a method for reducing a quantity of the trace information by compressing the trace information and outputting the trace information in a real time or a method for storing the trace information in a memory of the tracing device is employed. Further, a method is proposed that data showing an instruction length is allowed to be included in the compressed trace information (see U.S. Pat. No. 6,507,921, for example).
Further, cases that many functions are loaded in one microprocessor have been increased in accordance with the development of a micro-processing technique. As a result, a processor module for executing an instruction and an application processing circuit for processing other application may be possibly mounted on one microprocessor.
However, even when the operation of the processor module can be completely traced, the operation of the application processing circuit cannot be traced. When the operations of the processor module and the application processing circuit are respectively traced, a quantity of information to be traced by the tracing device is greatly increased.